


here's the best part (distilled for you)

by speedboat



Series: order of operations [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: ...sort of, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Steve Harrington, Closeted Character, Developing Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Gay Billy Hargrove, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Insecurity, M/M, Pre-Season/Series 03, Queer Themes, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, flangst, the flangst is real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 13:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20009113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speedboat/pseuds/speedboat
Summary: “I’m sorry,” Steve says. He puts a placating hand on Billy’s. “I haven’t told anyone. I won’t.”He doesn’t take his hand away. Billy doesn’t know what to do; if he moves in the slightest, he’s afraid Steve will take it back. After a minute, the thing that’s been simmering below the surface rises.“Can I ask you something?”“Sure,” Steve says.“Why did you and Wheeler break up?”or: opening up. maybe.





	here's the best part (distilled for you)

**Author's Note:**

> hi! i just want to give a little warning that billy rationalizes his abuse in this chapter, feels sympathy for his father, etc. i feel good about this in terms of characterization, but if you are someone who has a personal history of abuse, you might want to be gentle with yourself while reading this!!! i am not, under any circumstances, saying that anyone should forgive/empathize with their abuser. <3 love u all.

“When do you leave for college?” Billy asks, thumbing absently at a composition book on the bedside table as he reaches over Steve’s head for a tissue to clean up the come on the inside of his thighs and splattered across his stomach. They’d come straight from basketball practice because Max and Dustin were home sick, fucked all sweaty and gross on top of Steve’s (weird, depressing, plaid) duvet, but afterwards, Steve had wriggled under the covers, and Billy had followed him, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’re not, like, cuddling, but they’re lying like two little parentheses beneath the covers, close enough that Billy can feel Steve’s breath on his face. They probably shouldn’t do this for long; Billy’s subconscious is literally planning their gay beach wedding as he lies here, mooning over Steve’s eyes. 

Steve’s brow wrinkles a little. He looks down at Billy’s fingers, tapping on the mattress.

“I’m not going to college,” he says.

“Oh.” Billy kind of assumed that if you had the money to pay for it (which, based on Steve’s insane rich-boy house, he does) going to college was sort of a given. “How come?”

“Uh,” Steve lets out a hollow sort of half-laugh. “Well, I barely got in and it seems like kind of a waste of money on me. Since I’m not really...college material.”

“Oh,” Billy says again. “That’s cool, though. I don’t know if I’m college material either.”

“Yeah?” Steve says, looking back up at him. He stares deep into Billy’s eyes and Billy finds himself leaning in, feeling almost like he’s going to fall in. “But you’re so good at Bio. And you’re in Nancy’s senior English class.”

Billy feels his face heat up. Most of the time, people look at him and assume he’s stupid. “How do you know that?” 

“She just told me,” Steve shrugs. “I don’t know, I was talking about you, and she was like ‘you know Billy’s really smart, right?’”

“You were talking about me?”

“Um.” Steve blinks at him. Big fucking doe eyes. “Yeah?”

Billy’s stomach drops. He wishes it was because he got to be excited that Steve thinks about Billy outside of his bedroom. Instead, he’s thinking about who else Steve’s told if he’s told his ex-girlfriend. All the roads that could lead back to Neil.

“Did you tell her about u--” Billy starts, panic probably evident in his voice.

“No!” Steve says. “Not like, you know, about you and me or anything, I haven’t told her that. We were talking about basketball, I think.”

“Because you can’t...My dad would freak.”

Steve stares at him for a minute.

“Does your dad know?” Steve asks. “About you? Or, uh, sorry, that was stupid, obviously not. Is he, like, homophobic?”

“He’d kick me out,” Billy says. “Or, I don’t know. Probably he would.”

Steve’s eyes are enormous and brown and they blink at him, moonlike, dripping in sympathy. It makes Billy squirm.

“I mean,” Billy tries to inject as much bravado and humor as he can muster. “We haven’t really talked it over.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. He puts a placating hand on Billy’s. “I haven’t told anyone. I won’t.”

He doesn’t take his hand away. Billy doesn’t know what to do; if he moves in the slightest, he’s afraid Steve will take it back. After a minute, the thing that’s been simmering below the surface rises.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Steve says. 

“Why did you and Wheeler break up?” He can’t look at Steve’s face as he asks it, hyperfocuses on the mole on Steve’s wrist. 

“Oh.” Steve sighs. “Um, well, as you know, she dumped me, so. You’d have to ask her.”

“Did you have any sense it was coming?”

“Uh...not really,” Steve says. He looks down at their hands, just for a second, and Billy feels his face burn. “I mean. I could sort of tell that she wasn’t happy near the end, but I just thought that I had to, like, give her time to come around. I don’t know. I tried to be a good boyfriend. I was always, you know, faithful and I tried to be there for her, but. I don’t know. She needed something else.”

“Byers?” Billy asks, and Steve flinches just a little. 

“Yeah,” he whispers. 

“Well, fuck her,” Billy says, and Steve barks out a little laugh.

“Nah,” he says. “Nancy...she...used to be, I guess, like, the most important person in my life. I owe her a lot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Like. I used to be exactly like Tommy. Or, worse than Tommy. Like, I made Tommy Tommy, you know? And she came along and told me I was being an idiot and just. She really helped me see myself different.”

“Different?” Billy asks.

“Uh,” Steve gives another embarrassed little laugh. “Better? Like I didn’t have to, um. Prove anything with her. I finally felt...worthy, I guess. Like I didn’t have to show something for myself.”

Billy’s heart flips.

“I just used to try, like, really hard to be what people want me to be,” Steve says. “It’s why I was such an idiot for most of high school. I just wanted people to like me and it was so fucking dumb. And I just realized when I was with her that it was all this big, dumb...fake thing. And I could just be how I wanted to be. I didn’t have to buy people stuff or try to get good grades or earn anything or do anything to be worthy.”

“It’s kind of stupid,” Steve says. “‘Cause she says she didn’t love me, in the end, but I think. I think I learned to--” He seems to cut himself off, then. “Sorry,” he says, sheepish.

“You learned what?” Billy says. He can feel Steve’s knees pressing against his own, warm and solid.

Steve shakes his head, shifts his face a little to hide in the pillow. 

_I like you_ , Billy thinks, looking into Steve’s big, brown eyes. They’re a little wet, or Billy could just be imagining things. 

Billy pulls into Steve’s driveway on Thursday night, back still throbbing. They’ve been in a rhythm lately, where Billy will tell Neil he’s going to the library to use their computer after dinner and then go and see Steve instead. He’s tried to be careful about the lies, to keep them simple and manageable. But tonight, he’d told Neil he was going to write his English paper and Neil had asked what the paper was about.

Billy had panicked. Despite the trial by fire that he’s been raised in, Billy’s not a good liar. He’d taken too long to remember the name of any book, and then it had been _Where the Red Fern Grows_ , which even Neil knows isn’t a book Billy’s writing an essay about. And Neil had shoved Billy into the front door, shoved his lower back right into the doorknob, where Billy can now feel an impressive bruise forming. He’d pushed Billy’s face into the door, too, and there’s just the beginning of a mark there. And he’d told Billy that he wasn’t to lie to him, and that he could tell when Billy skipped class, and Billy had said _yessir_ , and then he’d just...let Billy go. 

It's always about the fucking power with him. Sometimes Billy wants to point out that he already _has_ it. 

Billy knocks on Steve’s front door, and Steve opens the door too quick, like he’s been hovering for a while. 

“Hey,” Steve says.

“Hey, Billy says.

“You’re late,” Steve says. “You texted like an hour ago.”

“Sorry,” Billy says. “Got held up.”

“What’s with your face?”

“Can I come in?”

Steve moves aside. Billy steps inside the house, letting the clean, quiet, safety of it envelope him. Steve’s stupid living room is, like, the size of Billy’s house.

“Seriously,” Steve says. “What’s up with your face?”

“Uh…” 

Explaining to other people the relationship Billy has with Neil is damn near impossible. It’s true that Neil is the person who pushed Billy into the wall hard enough to break a rib when he was thirteen, but it’s also true that he’s the person who taught Billy how to ride a bike. He rides Billy’s ass about grades and respect and time management and a hundred other impossible standards he has, but that’s a kind of love, too, Billy tells himself. Neil had enlisted in the Air Force at age seventeen and hadn’t gotten to finish high school, and he’d stayed in for ten years to make sure Billy was fed and clothed. He’s worked 60-hour weeks at the shop ever since he left the military after Billy’s mom skipped town. Neil will slap him upside the head for disrespecting him on the car ride to Billy’s games, but he’s always in the stands. Billy doesn't know if Steve's parents have ever even been to a game. He's never met them, or even seen them around, and he's here, like, all the time.

Billy doesn’t really allow himself to think about a narrative where his dad hitting him doesn’t come from a place of love. His brain couldn’t handle it, he thinks. They don’t ever talk about it, Neil’s never said _I love you._ But when Billy’s mom left, Neil stayed. And that counts. 

Steve stares at him expectantly. When Billy doesn’t say anything, Steve says, “your dad?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Billy says quickly, and he leans in to kiss Steve. 

Steve matches him on the kiss, for a minute, and then seems to remember himself, and he pulls away.

“Are you okay?” he asks, wide eyes searching Billy’s face. “Are you safe?”

“Sure,” Billy says, wishing they could go back to kissing. Leave it to Neil to ruin even this.

“Because that’s, like. That’s really bad, Billy. That he’s hitting you. He could...you could tell someone.”

“I’m not telling anyone.”

“I’m just saying--”

“My dad’s hard on me,” Billy says carefully. “He wants to make sure I don’t make the mistakes did.”

“He hurts you,” Steve says. He places a hand, so gently, on Billy’s cheek, right over the bruise. 

“He’s honest with me,” Billy answers, his face burning under Steve’s touch. There’s a dull shame building in Billy’s chest, a heavy despair he hasn’t felt since Neil announced that they were moving to Hawkins. 

“He hates gay people,” Steve says. The frown on his face is deepening. “Don’t you think that’s going to come up at some point?”

That’s...that’s the one that hurts Billy, really gnaws at him sometimes as he’s lying in bed at night, thinking thoughts he doesn’t want to think. The knowledge that all that love that Billy kind of thinks is hiding in Neil sometimes, clouded by his short temper and hard childhood and love of a good stiff drink, would go away if Billy ever came out to him, if Billy tried to love another man instead of hiding. Billy knows that a part of Neil suspects already, has suspected since he met Beto and Ash and Billy’s other friends back in California. Billy knows that Neil got angrier with him after that. That it had to be a little bit of why they moved away. 

“He doesn’t get me all the time,” Billy says, neutral. His heart is starting to pound, he can feel shame and anger and sadness start to rush through his blood. “And he’s not very progressive, but he loves me.”

“He hits you, Billy,” Steve says, more fierce now. He grabs at Billy’s wrist with his other hand, hard. Billy can hear his heart in his ears, feels his pulse quickening under Steve’s fingers. “Do you think that’s okay? Is that what you think love is?”

Billy boils.

He yanks back his wrist, and leans in closer to Steve, breath hot on Steve’s face. Steve sort of recoils, and Billy should be able to stop himself. He really should.

“Yeah, well, he’s _here_ ,” Billy snarls.

Billy watches Steve’s face as it shifts from disbelief to anger to a deep, deep hurt. 

“Get out,” Steve croaks.

“I’m going,” says Billy. He slams the door shut.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "bite the hand" by boygenius


End file.
